


Ember

by easorian



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:02:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26199763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/easorian/pseuds/easorian
Summary: Minutes before the Sundering and unaware of the impending disaster, Lahabrea and Emet-Selch meet with the 14th to plead for their return. A drabble on just how those two might have survived. (5.3 spoilers)
Kudos: 19





	Ember

“Have your speech prepared, do you?”

“Several in fact,” retorts Lahabrea as they walk a hall still cracked and damaged. Emet-Selch had not yet been able to attend to its restoration, and it’s testament to his grim mood that he makes no effort now. “As well as alternative arguments based on predictable places where the situation may take a turn for the worse.”

“Unnecessary precau — ”

“I should hope you don’t fall asleep in the middle of this one. For a man so prone to theatricality, I still cannot fathom your indifference to the orator’s art.”

Emet-Selch shrugs. “Theatre has a sense of its own ridiculousness. You, as yet, do  _ not _ .”

“Something I never plan to develop,” says the Speaker, gathering his robes and stepping up into a silver-grassed garden that had only just been regrown. Scorched tufts can still be seen around the new stone limning it, but those would be detailed soon enough after the Convocation’s ranks have been filled and a halt put to the struggle shaking beneath their feet even now.

“Here?” he asks, turning to assist Emet-Selch with a hand at his elbow. He’s given a thin smirk withering in its subtlety as around them the shivering grass that had been silver but a moment before turns a blazing gold. Right on time, the summoning begins to take hold of them. Azem never did like to keep a person waiting.

“Yes. Here.”

\---

When the world reorients itself and a hundred-hundred wisps of gold fade from their robes, the two find themselves standing on a cliff’s edge. Glasslike, its stone is a rich and overwhelming blue reflecting the sky above. Fine mist clings to everything, the air heavy with its crisp damp.

Beautiful, Lahabrea thinks. Preserved at great cost, and beautiful.

He thinks it odd that he can see no sign of a temporary dwelling or even a camp, nor sense anyone else nearby. It’s as though Azem had trekked out here only for this summoning and to hide from them the details of their current project. But that couldn’t be right. He isn’t a threat. Suffering bitter differences of opinion, but never a threat.

He clears his throat and addresses the robed figure staring out over the water below.

“As you know, we’re in a grand predicament from which deliverance is near at hand. We’ve respected your wishes to be alone with your thoughts and now endeavour to have you join us once more in conversation, if not return to your Seat. For what are we, if we’re broken apart and drifting like so much untethered — ”

Azem turns to interrupt, mask glinting onyx and unable to hide their impatience. “Get. To the point.”

“I could not have suffered a more difficult audience,” sighs Lahabrea, mostly to himself as neither of the other two seem inclined to pity him for the pain of a truncated performance.

“The Convocation is a wheel spinning off-centre without your guidance,” Emet-Selch says, picking up the frayed end of his companion’s plea even while smirking. “Elidibus has re-emerged to mend our troubles, but the effort is misguided if we don’t have you as well.  _ We _ must be whole in order to make this star whole.”

Azem laughs once, sharp. “‘Elidibus.’”

Silence falls heavy between them all until Lahabrea can stand it no longer and steps forward. “You rebuffed Venat. It didn’t stop them, but it gives me hope that you may yet see reason and return with us to finish our work.”

“And  _ you _ rebuffed my needed guidance in favour of genocide.”

“In favour of partial and very temporary sacrifice,” corrects Emet-Selch, apparently unable to help himself in the face of an old friend’s scorn. The wind picks up around them, bright and cold and catching at their robes like the fingers of the lost.

As the two bicker, Lahabrea riffles through the notes so carefully ordered in his mind and makes to start an alternate version of his well-rehearsed entreaty. Yet something stops him.

It’s the wind, gone as soon as it came.

No sound precedes the tearing of the world this time, but all of them feel the stitched seam of creation splitting apart. The scents of stone, fire, and the oldest of aether wash over them as the sea begins to rise with dizzying speed up the cliff face below.

It’s no longer the colour of water.

Already in action before the other two have moved past stunned surprise, Azem is reversing the summoning spell with shimmering geometry spilling around their feet. “Return to the city and assist the others!”

“Come with us!” starts Emet-Selch, but —

\---

It was always going to be too late.

They never again stand in Amaurot for in the moment of entering transference and before the spell can fully resolve, gold gives way to oblivion and the strangest sense of ringing metal hangs heavy in their slumber.

\---

Lahabrea fumbles to his senses first and then feverishly wishes he hadn’t.

It isn’t so much the endless dark deeper than any clouded night but rather the utter lack of any sort of living aether around him. Them. He finds Emet-Selch suspended in the same shadow, apparently more affected than himself by whatever accident has left them here in a place with no direction, no sound, no wind, no _ anything  _ other than their own souls.

_ Souls. _

He festers on his suspicions as he waits for his companion, choosing to give him a few moments of peaceful rest while he investigates this empty nothingness. Turning to experimentation, he discovers that he can Create and yet not be able to draw from the surroundings for his purposes. He also discovers that the work is just a little bit fatiguing. That, more than anything, frightens him.

Releasing a luminescent and tendriled creature to float nearby, he returns to his companion’s side as he wakes. Familiar enough with Emet-Selch’s propensity to play possum when he’s overwhelmed or recalcitrant, Lahabrea knows to watch for the shimmer of wakeful aether and not for any movement that might betray that he no longer sleeps.

He leans forward and tips the man’s mask up rudely. “Good evening. Now is not the time.”

“Must you?” asks Emet-Selch, pushing his hand away.

“Yes. With your expertise, can you confirm where we are? What is this place?”

“We’re caught between,” Emet-Selch says after some time, opening his eyes with an expression of acutest annoyance. “It’s simple enough to get out, which you would know if you ever bothered to travel longer distances than between the Bureau and your laboratory.”

Lahabrea ignores the barb. “Whatever happened back there, I can’t feel the other side.”

The Architect stirs himself, growing hushed as he joins in the realization that they’re completely alone. “I can see different location anchors we could use.”

“Points around the star, then?”

“No.” There’s a sharp and trembling wire of unmistakable panic in his voice. “No, the star isn’t… It isn’t there.  _ It isn’t there. _ ”

\---

The Speaker forgets what language is, that there are such things as words or that there is even a point to communication at all. For who does it serve, now? They remain suspended together for a long, long while, with neither saying anything nor even yet able to mourn. For the moment, all is glassy disbelief. 

And then it is guilt: a smothering weight so much deeper than the rift around them that presses and tears at their being. While lost here, did they doom a star by their absence? Had there nearly been enough strength in the Convocation to find an answer or at least buy time to find one? Had they been the little bit of difference between survival and annihilation?

It is the thing-that-is-Elidibus that finds them like this. A summoning’s summoning, untouched by whatever disaster has befallen their home while they floated senseless. It watches them in the dark as they despair, unreadable.

With difficulty, Lahabrea latches onto the meaning of its presence. Could it — he — have survived if Zodiark and their star had not?  _ Where there is no light, an ember of hope can feel like an inferno _ , he thinks.

And so he takes hold of that ember.

Emet-Selch is wrong.  _ Something _ still remains, and they will find what it is and repair it with all the speed their fallen kin are due. It is the legacy of memory and the responsibility of their Seats. It is the only thing he has to keep the crushing dark of futility at bay.

And so he listens to Elidibus as he speaks, and he plans.

There is work to be done.


End file.
